I honestly don't know where to put this, but it is the biggest TW guide like ever so ill brag about it

Besides i know how much corpboy loves to move my posts around IntroductionThere are three levels of offense in Tribal Wars. Village level offense, player level offense and tribe level offense. The key to being a successful player is optimize all three of these levels in terms of efficiency. All operate independent of each other and are all essential.

Village Level OffenseOn the village level, the most important part of building offense is building the strongest army possible as quickly as possible. Offensive armies should be made up of three units, Axes, Light Cav and Rams. Looking at the statistics for each unit, axes are by far the strongest offensive unit produced in the barracks, the light cav are the strongest unit produced by the stable and rams are essential, which I will talk about later.

It should easy to see that axes are better than spears/swords for attacking. But what about light cav over heavy cav? The key here is in farm space. For every two hcav that you build, you can build three lcav. When you build a full army, lcav are the better unit to build and far more economical. Rams, rams, rams. I can't stress enough how important it is to use rams for offense. An enemy's wall amplifies their defending ability significantly. The only way to break through heavy defense is with rams.

Now, how many of each should you build? The optimal build ratio is approximately 6000/3000/240 axes/lcav/rams. This assumes that you have a level 25 barracks and level 20 stable. I have heard it over and over again, "but axes are better than lcav", so I should build more axes. I can not stress how misguided this is. It is true that in terms of numeric attacking power, axes are per farm space better for attacking, but there are important considerations. First off, this ratio, 6000/3000/240 is the fastest to build. You will have more armies faster if you build this ratio, which means you can attack more often. Secondly, most players build either an equal number of spears and swords or more swords. They also tend to use hcav which defend like swords.

Since most player's defense's are sword heavy, having a higher lcav ratio is highly advantageous. It is very very rare for a player to build more spears than swords.

Lastly, the 240 rams. This is the optimal number of rams for eliminating the effects of a wall. This is a complicated subject and is unbelievably situational. I will leave this discussion for another chapter. However, it is simple enough to say that you need 235 rams minimum with each attacking army. The extra 5 rams are for faking, which is a part of the next section: Player level offense.

Player Level OffenseFirst, groups. I recommend that all players have two groups (in addition to others that you might have). "Offense" and "Building Offense". I will explain what I have found to be the most efficient system at building offense both quickly and with as little hassle as possible. Lets face it. The more easily you can do book keeping, the more efficient you will be as a player. A skill that I think a lot of players miss is the ability to change village's groups often and regularly to make their management easier.

Using the "Building Offense" group, if you have all the villages that need to build offense in one group you can easily see which villages are not building and which villages need certain resources. Since each village in this group is functionally doing the same thing, logging onto your account, within a few seconds you can easily do everything that you would need to to ensure that your offense is rebuilding as quickly as it possibly could be. No more remembering villages, no more searching for villages or forgetting which villages need building. Once a village finishes the army that it is building, it should be moved over to the "Offense" group.

Using the "Offense" group, it is easy to see how much firepower you have at your disposal. There are very few instances when you should be attacking without a full army and by grouping your villages this way, you will again be able to see quickly how much offense you have ready to go. This also makes storing bundles easy, because none of the villages in the "Offense" group need resources for building troops, you can easily store bundles in mass with out worries of forgetting a village or having to go through each village one at a time.

Keeping one's offense organized allows that player to become an effective fighting machine. It also allows that player to help other players out. The more under control things are, the more aid can be offered to other people, which leads into tribe level offense.

Tribe Level OffenseArguably, this section could be several pages long, and maybe when I have a chance (probably when I quit) I will write up a good long version of this with high levels of details and illustrations. But this will have to do.

Of all the places where one can create an advantage, this is by far the largest. With out question, the ability to coordinate multiple players' offenses is the holy grail of this game. The easiest way of taking out a large player is through teamwork. Not only is it easier to take them out but it is more efficient. Players are less able to stack or play effective defense if they have to defend against multiple players. The key here is organization. You need a system for assigning or claiming villages. Spreadsheets work well, but there are a lot of options. The point is that everyone should be able to see who is supposed to attacking which villages and people should be able to see which villages they are supposed to noble and which ones they are supposed to stay away from so that their teamates can take them.

Lastly, there is the issue of 'fakes'. Fakes are attacks that are mean to look like an army, but are in fact a single unit designed to 'fake out' another player. Clever use of fakes can be used to mask a tribe's true intentions. By sending fake attacks at neighboring players to a target, those players are far less likely to support the real target. But this is an over simplification. Most good players can see through fake attacks just by looking at them. So how do you make convincing fakes?

I detailed in the village level offense section that each village should have 240 rams and that only 235 should be a part of an army, leaving 5 rams in the village. Lets say that we think that we will need 2 armies to clear a particular village, and we have two offensive villages to work with. By sending two attacks at one village and sending 1 ram at 5 surrounding villages, it is impossible to know which village is really under attack. From a defender's perspective, all they see are 6 villages that have two attacks incoming. If you do this with multiple villages, it becomes almost impossible to decipher and you will be able to clear many villages very quickly.

Another common tactic against good players is the fake noble train. By sending four consecutive single ram attacks, a defender may mistake this for a noble train and hurry defenses to a village that you aren't really planning to attack. An added twist (kudos to burns for teaching me this), if a player is sniping noble trains, you can send an army from one village and then three single ram attacks and then a full army from a second village. To most players, this will look like a clearing army and then a noble train. If the player has been sniping nobles, they will usually remove their defense and let you clear their wall and then put the defense back after the first army hits. By doing this, you will attack their defenses without a wall.

Without teamwork, this game ends up becoming a stalemate. From the receiving end, a well organized offensive is virtually impossible to stop, no matter who the player is. Tribes have virtually infinite time to organize an offensive, meaning that they can coordinate perfectly in battle time. Defensively, while players have a built in advantage (they can stack troops), as a tribe, it is very hard to coordinate on the fly, even if the attack is from long range.

ConclusionThis guide is aimed at players 100k points and up. I doubt someone with fewer than 10 villages will find this guide on offense useful. There are a lot of holes in this guide and a lot of things that I didn't put in. Primarily because this is getting pretty long and because its hard for me to organize my thoughts. Perhaps I will revise this and put in more details later. Any questions and/or comments/feedback is appreciated.BackgroundI boast a relatively low defensive ranking in W1. One could argue that I have less experience than the average player defending my villages. To counter this, I can honestly say that I've watched teammates defend and when I attack, I see how players defend their villages. I've seen the best players defend against unbelievable odds, and have learned in my opinion how to defend effectively and efficiently.

IntroductionFirst, what is the objective of defending? For me, the objective of defending my villages is to slow down an opponent until I can resume the offensive. In the long run, you can NOT defend and win this game. The best outcome you can hope for is a stalemate, and who wants THAT as the best thing that can happen? By defending effectively and efficiently, you maximize your potential to strike back and make gains offensively. Threats do not disappear by defending correctly, they only abate when you show aggression and your opponent backs off or you make offensive gains toward them.

Like offense, there are three levels of defense in Tribal Wars. Village level defense, player level defense and tribe level defense. Unlike offense however, the area of focus is at the player level defense. I will examine in detail each of these levels, focusing on the player level defense.

Village Level DefenseAs a relatively advanced player, you should know that there are three primary defensive units in this game. Spears, Swords and Heavy Cavalry (hcav). Just a brief recap just so that everyone is on the same page. Spears defend primarily against cavalry, swords and hcav defend primarily against axemen. I advocate the even defense strategy, that is having an equal number of cavalry and axemen defense. There are strong arguments for a lopsided defense and it IS highly dependent based on the situation.

Village Structures:10k/10k Spears/Swords SplitThis is by far the most efficient setup in terms of farm space. There are two downsides however. First, it takes a very long time to build. To be exact, with a lvl 25 barracks it will take 45 days to build, in this game, that is a long time. Secondly, moving troops around is slow. When villages are clustered together this isn't a big deal, but the further apart villages are, the more problematic this becomes.

8k/2k Spears/hcav Optimized DefenseThis is a highly popular model of defense. Essentially, you sacrifice 20% of your troop effectiveness in exchange for a faster build time and faster movement. In contrast to the 10k/10k split, this configuration only takes 17 days to build. This is a THIRD of the time required to build the first configuration.

What should you use?As a default, I strongly encourage players to use the 8k/2k spears/hcav as a default. Besides the reasons I gave above, it is simply easier to rebuild your defenses after an attack with it. After an attack, being able to re-build your defense 3 times faster is a huge advantage. It is virtually impossible to realistically re-build a 10k/10k defense when fighting good players, you just don't get that much time to recover. There is however a place for the 10k/10k defense. For long term support, or other instances where you just need a village stacked, the 20% fighting effectiveness proves useful, just don't lose those troops or you will have a village completely out of commission.

I strongly caution against deviating from these two standards. I have seen people mix spear/swords/hcav. While I can sort of understand the mentality that a hybrid village can fulfill both situations, in reality, you are much better off choosing one method per village and sticking with it. There are very few instances where the hybrid army will be better than one of the more pure forms of defense. Hybrid villages also make thinking through your defense much more complicated, something that you don't want to do when you have 50-2000 attacks incoming.

Player Level DefenseThere are two primary ways of defending your villages effectively and efficiently. Both are extremely effective, but can prove disastrous if use improperly. Which system you use depends on your answer to this question: Can I hold off my opponent through defensive strength alone? This does NOT mean, "Can I destroy my opponent's offense?" Offensive troops build much faster than defensive troops, so the concept of troop preservation should be paramount. If the answer is yes to the above question, then your method should be Stack. If your answer is no, then your method should be Dodge/Snipe.

Stack DefenseThis is a pretty simple tactic to explain and use. Simply put, you put as many troops as you can in a village before an attack lands. The more troops you can put into a village, the more you minimize your troop losses. A W1 player named Undo stated that it wasn't worth defending a village with less than 30k/30k worth of spears/swords or the spear/hcav equivalent. While this is a decent guideline, depending on what world you are on/what your situation is, this number could vary from 10k/10k to 200k/200k (I've personally seen both of those extremes in the past 3 months). Essentially, you are trying to kill enough of your opponent's offense so that you can re-build your defense quicker than they can re-build their offense. This tactic works well when you know an attack is coming, or it is launched from a long distance.

Dodge/Snipe DefenseThe only way that you lose a village is by your opponent ennobling it. Lets face it, resources in a village are cheap, walls are cheap. Losing an army or a village is not cheap, both in terms of resources and time. Preserving those two, an army/village are the important things. Many times when you get attacked from close range, or when you are caught low on defense, it is impossible to effectively stack your villages.

The first step is to clean your village. Minimize your losses. Remove your troops before an incoming attack. Send your resources to one of your other villages. What do you lose by doing this? You lose your wall and you lose any remaining resources in the village, small price if this allows you to stop the attack. Very few players disguise their nobles effectively. First, nobles have a distinct time signature because no unit travels at the same speed as the noble. Secondly, most people use noble trains, four nobles sent in quick succession from a single village. By identifying incoming nobles, you can pick out the attacks that you MUST defend against. Beyond this, remember that you can take up to 3 noble hits before you lose the village.

You can't escort a noble with more than one army, and rarely do people escort with more than a handful of troops. By preserving your troops from full armies, you give yourself a chance to take out noble trains. This is obviously a temporary fix since your opponent can simply resend their armies and nobles later, but it buys you time, time that you can use to find defensive troops (yours or teammates) to stack your village with.

A slight adaptation of the noble snipe is quite possibly one of the most effective ways to stop an attack. Instead of trying to stop your opponent from taking your village, you help him. The single biggest bottleneck offensively are the number of nobles available. Killing a noble costs your opponent 1 bundle. Allowing your opponent to take your village and taking the village back costs your opponent the full cost of that noble (anywhere from 1 to several hundred bundles). Usually, what you will do is clear out your village and just before their noble train arrives hit the village with your own nobles, lowering the loyalty as close to zero as possible without taking it (usually 3 nobles). Then, timing a noble to land just after your opponent's noble train. By doing this, you will use one noble to re-take the village, but hopefully this will cost your opponent up to four FULL nobles. For a large player, this could be a couple thousand bundles worth of resources wasted.

There are obvious disadvantages to this strategy. First off, you waste a noble, in other words its costly. Second, you lose any troops that you have from that village, so it is usually best to do this with a village that has already lost its troops (like an offensive village that you have just attacked with.)

Overall DefenseIdeally, when defending, you should be using a combination of all of these tactics to hurt your opponent enough so that they will stop attacking. The key here is defend in full, or don't defend at all. Do NOT spread your troops out thin.

By forcing your opponent to take army and noble losses, you force them to delay any further attacks on you by several days or several weeks, depending on how effective your strategies are. I can't stress enough how playing effective defense is not enough. Once again, all you are doing is delaying your opponent. The only way to really secure yourself against them is to go on the offensive against them.

Tribe Level DefenseI've heard it said many times, "I'm a defensive player". In this game, there is no such thing as a successful defensive player outside of extremely strong, highly organized and structured tribes.

It is highly inefficient to dodge/snipe between accounts in this game, it is really only a player level tactic, not a tribe level tactic. Thus, the primary function of the tribe should be to stack vulnerable villages that are essential to holding. This is again, the all or none philosophy. When you defend a village, defend it strong. I never support someone unless I can ensure that at least 20k/20k worth of defense will be in that village. If there isn't, either I don't send support or I send the full 20k/20k myself.

Who should be supporting? Anyone who is not under attack or is unlikely to be attacked. Caution is good in this game, but there is a limit. Long ranged attacks can easily be sniped, so what is the point in keeping excessive amounts of defense in untouchable villages. Typically, at any given moment, I have 90% of my defense out defending other people that I know are likely to be attacked today. Of course there is always a reserve number of troops, just in case something unexpected happens, but in my experience, you can predict which villages are likely to come under serious attack, and which ones aren't. The key for a tribe is coordinating the movement of troops from their strong points to their borders with enemy tribes.

To me, a teammate or an ally losing a village is as big a problem as ME losing a village. First off, it hurts the tribe's interested, but also, more selfishly, teammates losing villages puts you in a more dangerous position. I have zero qualms losing troops in teammate's villages instead of my own. The fact that my teammates know this also means that if I need support anywhere, they will do what they can to help me quickly, no matter how much defense I need. It is simply good business to protect the interests of the tribe as a whole.Atkins views on...OD: Everyone is going on about OD, but the truth is OD doesn't matter. OD is a very inaccurate rating of a player unless their OD is zero. A simple fact is, a player has to lose troops to get OD so a player with a massive OD may have no/little troops. There are quite a few things you can learn from a players OD.

Defensive: If a 500 point player has 1000+ defense OD it either says they have lost a lot of troops or have been rimmed or restarted. Both are indicators of bad players. However it is also an indication of an active player, or a player with a high wall.

Offensive: Offensive OD can tell you how offensive a player is. A player with a high offensive OD normally dominates their area and has high offense and high points. I have dominated areas with little Offensive OD at all though, I farmed all my neighbors before they even have troops and usually I leave a few squares of gray around my main.

Defense guides according to village pointsDefenses are the most important part of playing the game. Players who have low defenses may be lucky but luck always runs out.

Objective one (less than 1000 points):Wall (level 10), Spearmen (level 2), Swordsmen (level 2), Scouts (level2) and have a troops strength of 300 Spearmen, 300 Swordsmen and 150 scouts - for a new player, this is harder than it sounds. Resources seem to take forever and farming is always a gamble when starting. Always focus on defenses. Other structures may have to be built while accomplishing.Objective two (1000 points):Wall (level 20), Spearmen (level 2), Swordsmen (level 2), Scouts (level 2) and have a troops strength of 750 Spearmen, 750 Swordsmen and 400 Scouts - This is the minimum defensive outline for a village of 1000 points. This is when others begin looking at you as an easy take (people like me). Once the above is coming to be, you can start to build up resources (wood, clay and iron). This is a transition stage.

Objective three (1500-2000 points):Wall (level 20), Spearmen (level 3), Swordsmen (level 3), Scouts (level3) and have a troops strength of 1500-2000 Spearmen, 1500-2000 Swordsmen and 750-1000 Scouts - This again is the minimum defenses for a village with the points range of 1500-2000). Resources should be your focus now. Upgrading them as much and as quickly as possible.

Objective four (2000-3000 points):Wall (level 20), Spearmen (level 3), Swordsmen (level 3), Scouts (level3) and have a troops strength of 2500+ Spearmen, 2500+ Swordsmen and 1000+ Scouts - This base line of defenses will keep most attacked at bay. Also paving the way to preparing to take another village.

Objective five (4000+ points):Wall (level 20), Spearmen (level 3), Swordsmen (level 3), Scouts (level3) and have a troops strength of 3000 Spearmen, 3000 Swordsmen and 1000+ Scouts - A player may have routed some energy into light cavalry already. They are important to raiding and a quicker build up. Resources are now getting up there. This is the point one should begin to build up an assault/attack force (Axemen and Light Cavalry). I strongly urge players with less than two villages not to build any Heavy Cavalry. They are expensive to build. A player can almost double their number of light cavalry with the resources spent on the heavy cavalry. The heavy cavalry also take up a lot of your population.

With the above outline, very few, if any, siege attempts on your village will take place. In the event that a much larger player goes after you while you are at 4000 or so points. Assistance given will be that much more effective.

Firstly, you may be interested to know that every time you strike your nobleman has a chance of decreasing the enemy's loyalty between 20 and 35%. Hold on, what IS this loyalty? Okay, let me explain that at last.

Basically, Loyalty is the loyalty of the village to its owners. When this little number reaches zero the attacker conquers the village, his attacking troops remain in the village and the nobleman disappears. The ONLY way to reduce loyalty is with an attacking nobleman. it regenerates at 1% per hour. So, how does this effect you? say you're attacking someone 20 squares away. That's more than a 10 hour trip one way. That's a long time. So your nobleman hits the enemy village and takes down... okay lets say you're lucky, he does 35%. Now he has to come back, in that time the village regenerates 10%. You send your man back out an hour later when you check back and 10 hours later you strike again, that makes 11% he has again regenerated before you strike. That's 21% altogether. That means you only did 14% loyalty damage. That is going to take a long time to conquer! This is why you need to attack someone close by, and plan a time when you can be online regularly (weekend maybe?) so you can keep up with it.

As I said before, when you conquer a village it starts out at 25% loyalty to you. This will rise until it becomes 100%, but in the meantime you are vulnerable. If someone successfully attacks you just once, you may just lose your entire, hard-earned, village straight out. Defend yourself well!

Another interesting point to make. I once read somewhere that you can potentially, if you chose to build this way, create an academy and nobleman with less than 2000 points, i forget the exact figure. I strongly suggest against this. You simply wont be strong enough. Two weak villages do not make a strong one. I am currently weakening my main village so that I can train and keep enough soldiers to conquer and protect 2 other villages until they are stable enough to rely on themselves. This means my main village suffers greatly, I cant remember the last time I upgraded anything other than my farm or barracks. This is going to happen to you no matter what, I suspect. You have to support your weaker villages in some way, since they will eventually be preyed upon (just the same way as you preyed upon them before, you nasty predator you) But to do so with a weak village? Well, I don't see the sense in that. Be patient.

Paladins are vital!!! With [vital item] Vasco's Scepter you can increase your offense by 30%. Imagine you wanted to clear a village and you had this item with a paladin. 10k axes and 2k lcav would fight like 13k axes and 2.6k lcav...improvement?

I was going to move this to Military Requirements topic. It seems it could fit there but it is a tool nonetheless. perhaps we should Put brief outlines of the best ways of doing it and then put it in the requirements section.

Do you have a more brief (maybe bullet pointed) version of this? Perhaps it can be moved as it is, its just more advice than order.